


The World Is a Hostile Country - Notes and Sources

by seventymilestobabylon



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:27:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29768604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventymilestobabylon/pseuds/seventymilestobabylon
Summary: I read a very reasonable amount of things and thought a very reasonable amount of thoughts about this fic. But I am not an academic, and I almost certainly got some stuff wrong. Here, therefore, is the place for me to lay out where I got all my information and how I made all my choices, so that anybody can check my work and discern what things are plausible vs what things are nonsense. There will be spoilers throughout, and the last chapter will be a bibliography.
Kudos: 2





	The World Is a Hostile Country - Notes and Sources

### Chapter 1

> Though the night was not cold, she held up her hands to the fire to warm them.

Throughout this fic, I’ve basically associated James with water imagery and Miranda with earth imagery (including Demeter, the most baller of the goddesses). I was going to associate Thomas with fire, but I ended up doing a range of Pentecost imagery for him—wind, fire, trumpets, bright light. Thomas strikes me as a very Pentecosty sort of person.

* * *

> If he wanted to immolate himself on the pyre of Thomas’s dreams, then he would do it with or without her cooperation. But she could not bear being made to watch him burn.

Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire.

* * *

If you look at pictures from London in 1705 and then pictures from Nassau in 1715, Miranda’s wearing the same ring on her left ring finger in both, so that seemed like an obvious thing to make her and James feel terrible about.

> Easy for him to ask this of her. He had always had the privilege of choosing his own betrayals.

Englishmen didn’t wear wedding rings in the eighteenth century. So James can just say “I’m married!” and that’s it for him, the lucky jerk.

My lovely first reader and cheerleader pointed out that Miranda’s doing a performance in this fic that she finds as self-nullifying as James finds it to do Peter Ashe’s shitty plan—which I guess I had written into the fic without noticing it. She and Thomas try so hard in my fic to attain a version of marriage that actually works for them, within the context of a very patriarchal society, and in Miranda’s mind, the fact that they succeed is because _Thomas is so great._ So to set all that aside and lie about herself as a wife is really, really hard for her.

### Chapter 2

> She entertained fantasies of pushing him over the side of the boat and watching him disappear into the dark, endless water. Better he should die quickly at her hand, than be torn apart by the hungry-eyed vultures in Parliament.

In the first draft of this fic, Miranda was a lot more checked out and dissociated from what James was doing, in part because when I wrote the early parts of her chapters, I didn’t have the strongest grasp on the specifics of how James and Peter would execute their plan. I’ve made her a lot, just a _lot_ angrier in revisions. This line about pushing James into the ocean is my absolute aesthetic. Plus, water imagery! 

> “It’s not about what _I’ll_ gain,” he said; “you know that.”

Here’s where I set up the central misunderstanding between Miranda and James. He thinks he’s doing this for her, so that she can have a good life in London. The fact that she’s arguing ferociously against _the thing she’s already said she wants_ is exactly the play James would use for his own life. If he wants something, he immediately starts compiling reasons he can’t or shouldn’t have or want that thing. (We see this later in the fic when he’s trying not to want to go home to London.) In part this is just who he is as a person, and in part it’s because he was so deeply damaged by the one time he really, really, really accepted something he wanted: Thomas and Miranda. 

> It was Thomas he _needed,_ Thomas with his wondrous certainty and the pure clear light of his love, that banished back any possible spectre of shame. Miranda was only herself.

Miranda and James idealize Thomas so much. In Miranda’s case, it’s because Thomas saved her from a life she would have found almost unbearable, and then made space for her to not be limited by the life he gave her. So her memory of Thomas is tinged by this feeling that he can do miracles. She has a much easier time than James adapting back to living with Thomas-the-person and letting go, to an extent, of Thomas-the-idea, and that’s partly because she has ten years of experience being married to him, but also partly because she’s the one who physically saves him from Savannah. The books feel balanced for her in a way that they won’t for James. 

> _Do you know what he told me about you?_ Eleanor Guthrie had once asked Miranda, intending to wound her.

I wish Eleanor and Miranda had gotten to spend more time together. The canon moment when Miranda refers to Flint as “James” and Eleanor doesn’t know who she’s talking about is 24 karat gold. 

> the never-ending racket of boots and bare feet against wood a few feet above where she lay

I have a friend who used to work on a tall ship, and he says the most unrealistic thing about pirate movies and shows is how people are always climbing onto a boat sneakily and nobody hears them. HA BLOODY HA HA said my friend. You can hear EVERYTHING. 

> When James had returned from the island on his warship—hair stiff with salt, fresh wounds scabbing over—he had told her the ships had wrecked and Gates had died. She saw now that he had left space in between, and she hadn’t noticed. After ten years, she should have known better.

This is my best lying trick. I recommend it to all. 

> the more a thing mattered, the closer he held it to himself.

This is a keynote of James’s character in this fic. He’s agreed to talk about something incredibly important to him (his queerness, and Thomas, who you’ll notice he’s careful not to think or talk about unless he has to) to an unsympathetic audience, and it makes him feel massively unhappy and out of control. That informs everything else he does in this fic, most notably the extent to which he tries to close himself off from Thomas.

### Chapter 3

I cut out a little memory that Miranda had during her convo with Abigail. Here’s the snippet:

> “How long would you mourn me?” Miranda remembered asking Thomas, mostly joking, a little because she saw how he looked at James and felt a pang over it.
> 
> Thomas looked down at her with his grave blue eyes. “Always,” he said. “I should never stop.”

Bless Thomas’s heart. But I cut it in favor of the line that ends this section, which I think is the correct path. 

> She wondered if spinets in Charles Town stayed in tune.

A very, very common complaint by British colonizers in warm wet climates was that their instruments wouldn’t stay in tune. They did not intend it for a metaphor. 

> she loves to go and see the lunatics at Bedlam

Most of my information about Bethlem Royal Hospital comes from Jonathan Andrews’s 1991 thesis _Bedlam Revisited: A History of Bethlem Hospital, 1634–1770,_ which you can access online for free ([link](https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1365)). Andrews’s fundamental argument is that Bedlam was horrible but not as horrible as people have painted it—which, eh, I’ll have more to say about that later on.

Bedlam was a popular tourist destination, and visitors were allowed in between 8 AM and 7 PM (or 9 PM in spring and summer) every day but Sunday. Crowds were especially thick in the Easter and Whitsun seasons.

Admission was not charged, but it was customary to put money in the poor-box and tip various of the staff members, as Abigail says. The more seriously ill inmates were kept locked in their cells (which didn’t stop visitors from peering in at them), but many were allowed to walk the grounds and even give informal tours.

### Chapter 4

> When the supply ship comes at Christmas

Provision ships regularly reached the Caribbean colonies around Christmas, and they were frequent targets for pirates, who would hang out in Caribbean ports waiting for them to show (Earle 2005). James and Miranda are probably lucky they got the stupid spinet at all.

(Another random thing I learned is that ships leaving and coming to the Caribbean tended to avoid having too much of any one commodity aboard a single ship, because then the price of that thing would go down. Sugar merchants could have loaded 100 hogsheads of sugar onto a single ship without any problem, but then they’d have gotten less money per hogshead. This is not relevant to spinets; I just thought it was interesting. [Dunn 1972])

> She took him to his first concert, at the Theatre Royal: Visconti and Paisible performing Albinoni’s concertos and Visconti’s own sonata for flute and violin

Initially I planned to have had Miranda take James to a slightly less scary venue, the York Buildings on Villiers Street, which I encountered in Brewer (1997). But even though Scott (1937) was super helpful and specific, I was nervous about making claims for exactly what would have been performed there. So I went with the Theatre Royal instead, which sounded like it would have done a better job of underlining the social difference between James McGraw and the Hamiltons. Also, I was able to figure out specifically what music would have been performed by specifically whom in the period I cared about (Tilmouth 1957–58).

Here’s one of Albinoni’s violin concertos ([link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSJ1AJ_wv0)) . I couldn’t find a recording of Visconti’s sonatas for flute and violin, but that’s just as well (hell is other flutes, &c). We must content ourselves with this Visconti sonata instead ([link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD3RSLUMtiA)).

[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjgndGuy77o) is a link to an oboe concerto by Albinoni instead of that violin one. I share it here because one of the comments for it on YouTube said “it is unbearably beautiful more than mere mortals can endure” and another of the comments said “this gave me an oboner.”

PS if you are curious about whether I found it hilarious to imply that Miranda _Pretty Woman_ ed James, the answer is yes, I did. Also I just personally find violin concertos to be beautiful in a way I find quite hard to describe. They make me feel all shivery and like maybe humanity wasn’t such a disastrous mistake after all.

> “Like fuck,” says James, and goes on reading to her from _The Life of Donna Rosina._

I got ideas from various places about what James, Miranda, and Thomas would be reading. When they’re reading philosophy and nonfiction, I typically got those authors and titles from Brewer 1997, Champion 2014, Harrison 1990, and Rivers 1991. In cases like this when they’re reading fun stuff (like now), I typically got those from Orr 2017. You can read _The Life of Donna Rosina_ on Google Books! ([link](https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Life_of_Donna_Rosina_a_Novel_Being_a/CAVePVSQ1OYC?hl=en&gbpv=0)) 

> and she, weary traveller

Yes this is a _Doctor Who_ reference, and I am not sorry. 

> I would not wish any companion in the world but you.

This is a quotation from _The Tempest;_ Miranda says it to Ferdinand. We find out later that it’s what Thomas said to Miranda right before he was taken to Bethlem, so it really haunts her. I deserve some kind of medal for my moderation in quoting _The Tempest,_ which is my favorite Shakespeare play and takes place in the Caribbean and has a character called Miranda and also is just eminently quotable. But I’ve only used this quote, and then there’s a part where Miranda says _O brave new world_ when she’s being a bitch to James. I deserve a fucking trophy about it.

### Chapter 5

> Thou art the flower of Cities all

This is from a William Dunbar poem about London. I forget where I encountered it.

### Chapter 6

> “The fuck we don’t.” James took a threatening step towards Peter as he spoke, his face flushed with anger.

Flint and Eleanor Guthrie are such good bros. I have a lot of feelings about their relationship and the time Eleanor found him all fucking drunk in the back room of the bar and the time James found her dying and told her a merciful lie. 

> James was standing at the window, half concealed behind the curtain, his face a blur in the darkness. Thomas used to hide himself behind curtains, too, and sit in a window-seat to read or think or write letters.

I made a whole Thing in this fic about Thomas hiding behind curtains, and then had a bad moment in revisions when I went back to my notes from Weatherill (1996) and saw that I had written “curtains were rare!” But THANK GOD, curtains were rare for, like, regular folks. Rich people had them! It’s all okay! 

> He tolerated it briefly, then shrugged her off.

I worried throughout this fic that James not liking to be touched would read like a rejection of Miranda or some kind of failure in their relationship. It isn’t! He likes the casual display of affection, but he just likes it to be brief. I tried to write it as a case where they know each other well enough after all these years that they’re pretty good at navigating this. I don’t know. Keep an eye on it please and let me know how you think I did. It is an exact depiction of how I, personally, feel about being touched. 

> She used to amuse herself by imagining him as one of the Fates. He would not have given up the eye to his sisters at their whim, but kept it and made himself the king among them and called it _primus inter pares._

_Primus inter pares_ means _first among equals._ I made a jerk-off motion with my hand every time I reread this bit of the fic, which I think means it is a successful characterization of James. 

> If we want to be sure of success in Parliament, we’ll need to convince the merchants first, and anyone else the Lords might listen to.

So IRL the situation was as follows: Merchants and colonial governors bitched about piracy ceaselessly, and in 1716–7 the king’s son ordered the Council of Trade and Plantations to find a solution. Woodes Rogers teamed up with the merchant Samuel Buck and a bunch of other partners to send ships, soldiers, and workers to bring order to the Bahamas. The group of them went on a big letter-writing campaign to the Lords Proprietor for the Bahamas to be like “we raised all these funds! Let Woodes Rogers be the governor!” They also put together a petition, signed by 56 merchants, to send to the King. The writer Joseph Addison helped them out! He was on the Council of Trade and Plantations for some reason. A general pardon was agreed to, and Woodes Rogers was made governor. Ta-da! (Cordingly 2012) In my fic, James and Peter are pursuing a similarly multi-pronged strategy, where they’re trying to get as many potential stakeholders on board as possible.

### Chapter 7

There really was a rhinoceros at the Belle Savage Inn in 1684 (Cowan 2005). When I discovered it, I immediately knew that I wanted it to be the occasion of Thomas and Miranda meeting.

> Like a unicorn

Thomas, who’s just gone eight at this point in the fic, is mixing up a few different things and coming up with a plausible-to-a-kid version of a story that doesn’t exactly match to what was known (or believed) about rhinoceroses. The story that unicorns would yield to the touch of virgin girls was a common one. 

> More from instinct than anything else, Miranda puts her arm around him, and he makes a surprised sound that she feels as a vibration against her shoulder. 

I made myself go aw when I wrote this. 

> A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts

A real book! Here’s its full title and information: 

> A description of the nature of four-footed beasts with their figures engraven in brass: written in Latin by Dr. John Johnston. Translated into English by J.P. London: printed for Moses Pitt, at the Angel, against the little north door of St. Pauls Church, M.DC.LXXVIII. [1678]

AGAINST THE LITTLE NORTH DOOR OF ST PAULS CHURCH. The edition I consulted was from a subscription-based version of EEBO, the worst database on earth, but you can read the full text online [here](https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/HistSciTech/HistSciTech-idx?id=HistSciTech.Jonstonus). This is what it says about unicorns: 

> Isidore makes him all one with the Rhinoceros, and saith that his horn is so sharp and strong, that what ever he strikes at, he shatters, or peirces it through. . . . Some add, that this beast loves young Virgins so, that if one spreads but her lap, as he comes, he will lay his head there, and fall in a slumber, and is so taken.

But I’m using unicorns and rhinos as a vehicle to show that even as quite a small child, Miranda felt unsettled and alienated by patriarchal gender expectations. And Thomas muddling up unicorns and rhinoceroses, one of which is highly idealized and the other of which is on public display as a monster in restraints, prefigures the way he won’t be able to draw a bright line between James-the-person-he-remembers and Flint-the-pirate.

Incidentally, Miranda mentions to James McGraw meeting Thomas for the first time, and eh, it somewhat implies that she met him for the first time as an adult. But I wanted to do it this way, and she doesn’t _say_ she met him for the first time as an adult. Sorry, canon, I have fucked with you.

> Viscount Wallingford

Many English nobles have [more than one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtesy_titles_in_the_United_Kingdom) title. In those cases, the eldest son of a noble may use one of his father’s lesser titles as a courtesy title. In my fic Thomas is able to use the courtesy title _Viscount Wallingford._ I’ve just stuck this in there because I find it charming; it’s not backed up by canon.

Where I’ve used titles in this fic, [here's](http://laura.chinet.com/html/titles02.html) the cheat sheet I’ve employed for getting them right. This is also the basis for my claim that Alfred Hamilton’s younger brother, whom I invented for this fic, is an Honourable.

### Chapter 8

> The coronation and its many delays had prevented Parliament from beginning at its usual time in November of last year, and Peter reported that sessions were expected to continue through July, if not beyond.

Y’all cannot conceive how excited I was when I discovered that Parliamentary sessions in 1715 ran from March to September rather than the usual schedule of autumn to spring (Jones 2015). I thought I was going to have to have Peter and James poop around London for _the whole summer_ before they’d be able to get anything accomplished. But no! 1715 was a special circumstance! Queen Anne died in 1714, and there was a short Parliament in August; then King George’s ship to England was delayed, then coronation, and _then_ there was a general election in which the Whigs achieved a massive Parliamentary majority (the 1713 election returned 177 Whigs and 370 Tories; the 1715 one returned 341 Whigs and 217 Tories in the House of Commons). So that’s why (Jupp 2006). Hooray! 

> The Southern Secretary, General Stanhope, had also consented to a meeting, in which they attempted to persuade him to advocate their cause to the King.

In this era, there were two Secretaries of State, each of whom had a different set of places they were in charge of foreign relations with. [James Stanhope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stanhope,_1st_Earl_Stanhope) (later the First Earl of Stanhope) was the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, which officially would have given him control over relations with the Hapsburg Empire, United Provinces, Scandinavia, Poland, and Russia, while the Secretary of State for the Northern Department would manage relations with France, Switzerland, Italy, Iberia, the Channel Islands, and the colonies.

I’ve picked Stanhope for James and Peter to pursue as a Parliamentary ally because he:

1) Was a Whig (obv)  
2) Had a high degree of access to the king  
3) Fought bravely and extensively in the War of the Spanish Succession and would not be vulnerable to accusations of cowardice  
4) Later suppressed several Jacobite uprisings, which is good because Peter and James are going to argue that pardoning the pirates will undermine the possibility of a Jacobite uprising  
5) Got accused of being queer when he ran for office in 1710. By Jonathan Swift! That’s not relevant to the fic, but I just thought it was interesting.

Stanhope was much more powerful than the other Secretary of State at the time, [Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Townshend,_2nd_Viscount_Townshend), and he was involved in issues of alliance with France. I think it’s plausible that he might have successfully lobbied the king on matters of colonial policy. Hopefully this reasoning is sound.

Oh, and he was in Spain last time Miranda was in England, so that’s why she doesn’t already know him. This is all coming from Jupp 2006. Jupp was so fucking helpful across the board. The fic doesn’t go that deeply into how one might achieve political goals in 1715, but this book helped me clarify in my own mind a few possible strategies James and Peter might have pursued.

> They flogged men in Bedlam. She had heard that once, somewhere. Hadn’t she? 

This line is a reflection of the ambiguous position my Bedlam book took on how often patients were beaten. Beatings were not a standard course of treatment by doctors, and servants were specifically forbidden to hit their charges “except in cases of necessity.” In other words, individual staff members had a fair bit of discretion. Here’s what my book says: 

> While one must conclude that the flogging and abuse of patients by Bethlem staff was much more common than the Governors were aware, or than the impression they sought to give, it was also far rarer than the popular image of the hospital has suggested.

I don’t know what the popular image of the hospital has suggested, so I can’t speak to that, but this passage made me bristle. One of my overall complaints with Jonathan Andrews is that his book is working so hard to correct a historical record with which he assumes the reader is familiar that he glosses over _what that record is._ So it can be hard to get at details of what other historians have said happened, because Andrews is anxious to prove that those things (what things??) didn’t happen as much as you may think (how much am I meant to think????).

My two cents: Given the number of medical professionals nowadays who remain callous of the bodily autonomy and personhood of the mentally ill, I absolutely believe that violence and abuse against Bethlem patients happened with regularity and without oversight. I particularly believe that it happened to patients who did not behave according to the standards the staff demanded.

Disclaimer disclaimer, Andrews later expanded much of this material into a book, which I don’t have access to. So maybe he corrects all this in book format! I do not know. Y’all can check it out and let me know what you find.

> When Pastor Lambrick came over from England, with a library of nearly a hundred books, she had been willing to do just about anything to stay in his good graces. For two years he would not lend her any of the classics, only the sternest religious texts.

I don’t have evidence that missionaries brought books to Nassau, specifically, but where libraries existed in the colonies, they typically belonged to men of the church. Protestant religious organizations like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel wanted to counteract efforts by people like Catholics and Quakers to send books to English colonies (Ferlier 2018). Did I want to have someone make a joke and call it Society for the Regurgitation of the Gospel, YES, but I never found a moment to do it. 

> to find if the Sultan’s Head was still there

Coffeehouses were an important part of the (male) London social/intellectual/political scene in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, so I think it’s reasonable to imagine that Miranda and Thomas spent time in them. Cornhill did have a lot of booksellers, single women were known to own and operate coffeehouses (and I thought a single lady proprietor would be more likely than a man to let Miranda hang out there), and coffeehouses often had names that reflected the connection between coffee and Turkey.

PS I mentioned Lloyd’s earlier in this section. That was a coffeehouse too! It was the coffeehouse for men in the shipping trade, as well as a purveyor of maritime insurance. Peter wants to get the merchant traders on board ON BOARD SO TO SPEAK HO HO HO WE MAKE JOKES with the idea that his plan can benefit them by reducing the losses they take from pirates. (Cowan 2005)

> James’s face shuttered so abruptly and so completely that Miranda was startled, and he jerked his head away from her touch.

This is maybe the first place I tried to make it really clear that Miranda and James are just having completely different conversations. From his perspective, he’s come back to London on her advice (and in large part because he knows she’s miserable in Nassau and can’t stand it anymore) to do something that he finds very close to unbearable, and the thing that makes it bearable is knowing that he’s improved things for her. So any time she indicates that things are, for her, not improved, it shatters him. 

> like the wooden horse, outside the walls of Troy, and he the priest crying vainly for caution, _timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,_ righteous in his objection though it would cost him everything.

_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_ is the most famous line in the _Aeneid._ (I had a lot of anxiety whenever I had Thomas or Miranda think about Latin. Like, would they remember Latin if they haven’t been reading it regularly? They probably haven’t had much cause to use Latin! James, in my headcanon, is more defensive of his education and tries harder to keep up with Latin, but Thomas and Miranda really don’t have anything to prove in that regard. So when Thomas or Miranda remembers Latin, it’s usually quite famous bits, the bits you _would_ remember because people would talk about them a bunch.)

Anyway, the _timeo Danaos_ bit happens when Aeneas is recounting the story of what happened in Troy. A priest called Laocoon says it as he’s trying to convince the Trojans not to bring the horse inside the city. It means _I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts_ (the _et_ here is short for _etiam_ ). After he says it, Athena, who is on the side of the Greeks, sends her serpents to gobble up his sons, and the Trojans are like “welp it’s a sign, the gods want us to love this horse, let’s bring it right inside the walls, everything will be fine.”

I hope Laocoon had a chance to have a right old moan with Cassandra after everything went to shit.

> When had she ever been afraid of Peter? Surely in the old days she must have been alone with him often, and she had never felt like this, tremulous and poised for flight.

Being a woman suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. That is all. 

> because they had other fish to fry

This expression felt terribly modern to me, but [I checked](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22other+fish+to+fry%22&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F1715&tbm=bks) and people were saying it well before 1715. 

> Many of the late Queen’s advisers had been voted out in the recent election, but many more were peers and not so easily dislodged. . . . “They ended the war.” 

In April and May of 1715, the House of Commons was investigating several highly placed Tory ministers who had been involved in negotiating the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession. They were tainted with Jacobitism (Tories in general were always being suspected of Jacobitism), and Robert Walpole would argue that they had deliberately undermined England’s position in service of…THE PAPISTS. (Jones 2015, Boyer 1716).

(Everyone was very wound up about THE PAPISTS in 1715. The death of the last Stuart monarch had folks on high alert for the Pretender to make his move.)

I did not care enough to find out whether these Tory bros actually did anything wrong with the Treaty of Utrecht. I was just happy that Jacobitism was a going concern, since I knew I was going to have Peter and James argue that unrestrained pirates were likely to form alliances with the Pretender and cause real problems for the Crown.

> A contact of Peter’s, a privateer, supplied the lady’s maid.

I put Mrs Hudson in this fic, immediately forgot about her, and then had to quickly kill her so that Spain wouldn’t know how much of their money England stole. Although, for reasons I’ll explain in a little while, I don’t think the threat of Spain is actually as dire as the show makes it seem, and I’ve relaxed the stakes on that to a degree. 

> she had heard him argue that an unborn and unbaptized child should be cut from its dead mother’s womb rather than let it defile the consecrated ground where she was buried

This is an actual suggestion that I came across in my researches (Owen 1706). I don’t know if anyone actually did this incredibly fucked-up thing, but Miranda’s father as I’ve imagined him seems like the kind of self-righteous Fox News blowhard who’d argue for it out of some misplaced idea of ideological purity. Plus, I wanted to give a little hint at the kind of life Miranda rejected for herself. 

> that General Stanhope would take an interest, as a military man, but Walpole’s got him

Robert Walpole would soon become Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and at the time when this scene is happening (May 1715), he was chairman of a committee investigating the Tory ministers and the Treaty of Utrecht, as mentioned above. So what James is saying, when Miranda stops listening, is that Stanhope’s pretty busy helping with Tory-hunting proceedings and thus is slightly impatient with ideas about the Bahamas that are not super relevant to his current political interests. 

> For him, it was a very heavy-handed effort. He did not mean that he wanted music or peace, but rather that he remembered her saying that she did.

I like this conversation a lot because I always like writing conversations where James doesn’t have his shit together. Miranda reads this whole thing as an attempt by James to manipulate her into going along with this miserable political plan he’s unilaterally decided on. From James’s perspective, Miranda knows the whole plan is for her, she’s having doubts, and she wants to be reminded why it was a good idea in the first place, so that’s what James is trying for, albeit very clumsily because he’s exhausted and sad. 

> “You opened the door, and I’ve walked through it.” 

Motif alert! In VII in canon, Miranda says “The door is open. I’ve opened it for you,” and in James’s sections I’ve connected that explicitly to the flashback moment where he realizes the Jig Is Up and Alfred Hamilton has told Hennessey that James is boning Thomas.

### Chapter 9

James and the Hamiltons are hanging out at the Mall by St. James Park in this section, because frankly the show does not feature enough Hamilton/McGraw outings. I used [this 1745 painting](https://www.rct.uk/collection/405954/st-jamess-park-and-the-mall-0) as a reference.

I’m not sure how crowded it should be, realistically. It sounds like it tended to be very crowded indeed, but this is happening in the summer, when Londoners with country houses abandoned the city. So—maybe it’s okay?

> In the ordinary course of things, James is not much interested in touch without sexual intent.

I have given a perfectly reasonable and socially acceptable amount of thought to how much Miranda touches Thomas in this show vs how much James touches her. The only scene where she’s in a room with Thomas and _not_ touching him is when they’re at dinner with Alfred Hamilton—though admittedly our sample size is small. I also really love her relationship with Thomas being physical but not sexual, and I hope it underscores the fact that she shares different kinds of intimacy with her partners without experiencing it as a lack. 

> If we go home, I shall have to pay a call on Lady Cowper.

Lady Cowper was a diarist (Kugler 2002). She wrote the line that I’ve used as the title for this fic! Honestly she sounds exhausting, but I felt I should mention her somewhere in the fic. I loved her because she was hilariously bitchy. When her son’s mistress died, she said the following because she was AN ASSHOLE: 

> They who have Seen her last Will, tell me it was her Express Order to be Bury'd Close by the Ew:Tree ffor Which Fancy I can imagine no other Reason; unless it be to Suggest this Motto. Where I lost my Virginity, I lay my Body.

Could you even _imagine_ that level of pettiness. A woman has _died._

> When the topic of Don Quixote is exhausted

Okay, look, this doesn’t matter, BUT: There was a 24-page chapbook version of _Don Quixote_ published around 1695 that was basically just famous scenes from _Don Quixote_ with no connective tissue to explain why anything was happening. I found this weirdly poignant. Books under 24 pages typically cost between threepence and fivepence, whereas books of 200 pages could cost four shillings; so the truncated version of _Don Quixote_ was all that would have been available to most readers (Orr 2017). And I just felt really heartbroken to think that if Miranda hadn’t met Thomas, she’d never have read _Don Quixote_ and only maybe might she _possibly_ have encountered the teeny chapbook abridged version. Fuck the olden times. 

> Lady Brunswick told me that the Societies for Reformation are preparing a sermon to be published in condemnation of the government for promoting drunkenness, lewdness, and popery.

When it came time to replace the phrase “[society of some sort???? TK]” with an actual historical entity, it turned out I was very bothered indeed, and I went down an insta-research rabbit hole about the Society for the Reformation of Manners (sources were Burch 1940, Hurl-Eamon 2004, Quinlan 1956, and Sonnelitter 2010). It (slash, they—it had chapters all over England) was founded in 1691 to suppress immorality, as part of a general turn away from the decadence of the early Restoration period what with Charles II banging Nell Gwyn all over England and women performing on the stage like harlots. (Prior to writing this fic, my ideas about the Restoration were formed exclusively from the 2004 movie _Stage Beauty._ )

The idea was that the Society would find people doing vice out in the real world and then report it to the magistrates so that the magistrates would have to prosecute for breaches of the blue laws. (Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift both criticized the society’s members for not casting the beam out of their own eyes before looking for motes in the eyes of people of the lower classes.) They were deeply concerned about the project of regulating sexuality—in the 1720s they were responsible for several raids on gay brothels—and promoting “correct” masculinity.

The Manners Societies did not enjoy parliamentary support, as they mainly comprised middle-class people, nor did they make it their business to get involved (at least in 1705) in political controversies. So they would not (as far as I was able to tell in a (1) hour of research) have been an important foe to Thomas’s plan. However, they did strenuously oppose Catholicism, drunkenness, and prostitution, so I think it’s reasonable to suggest that they’d have been exercised about these pardons despite being more aligned with the Whigs than the Tories.

This scene, obviously, occurs before Blackbeard kills the Nassau governor’s wife and kid. Maybe it breaks up the fic? I don’t know. I’m not sure it serves a broader narrative purpose; I just wanted them to get to go on a damn outing.

### Chapter 10

I’ve given Thomas a nice uncle because I didn’t want to deal with any complications around him getting his earlship back. I was having a bitch of a time researching what would have happened if an earl’s heir was believed dead and then years later came back and wasn’t dead and they had to have a quarrel over who the rightful earl was.

I read… a lot of excerpts from various magazines of the period in order to mimic how they sounded for Benedict’s letter. It’s a weird thing to write fiction set in olden times, because people’s speech patterns would just have been quite different and I think trying to imitate that would be challenging for me and off-putting for a reader. So I’ve put all my worries on that front into this one letter from sweet old uncle Benedict. Here is my only effort at sounding old-timey, based on me just sitting down and reading old issues of _The Spectator_ and _Tatler_ for hours and hours. If you are thinking, _wow that was a waste of your time, this letter is basically nothing,_ you are not wrong.

### Chapter 11

> He is the tutor her father engaged to teach her Spanish, because she happened to mention, untruthfully, that Thomas’s father thought it right for ladies to know Spanish as well as French.

Listen. Listen. This is nakedly just me worrying about why Miranda would have known Spanish if she was, as I have made her, the sixth of seven children of a poorish clergyman. CANON COMPLIANCE IS VERY IMPORTANT TO ME.

(no it’s not)

(yes it is though)

> It is only because she knows Thomas that she is capable of thinking the thought, Thomas who pushes open her small world into vast infinity.

The central challenge of Miranda’s chapters, for me, was building out her relationship with Thomas. It was a challenge for a few reasons: 1, we’re not accustomed to seeing queerplatonic relationships between men and women, and it’s hard to escape the narrative pull to make this a different sort of relationship than the one I wanted to write; 2, I was absolutely goddamned if I was going to imply that any leg of this polyam triad was more important or primary than any other leg; 3, I had so little to go on, in canon, of what Thomas and Miranda were like together; and 4, Miranda clearly trusts and loves Thomas despite the fact that as her husband, there are many senses in which he legally owns her.

I loved the idea that Miranda thinks of Thomas as the door to the art and beauty and culture that matter so much to her, and that she’s permanently grateful to him for putting those things into her life. I’ve also put in some moments where you can see she’s trying to pay that gift forward to other people she cares about, which I think is borne out by canon: moments like when she gives James _Don Quixote_ and tells him to learn Spanish, or shows up at his flat to invite him to look at Art, or talks through sermon ideas with Pastor Lambrick. (You see over and over in this fic that Miranda unconsciously copies Thomas in how she does relationships.)

> The Dowager Lady Shaftesbury, whose son is a friend and neighbor of Thomas’s, invites Miranda to stay at St Giles House so that she can attend the funeral, which is such a kindness to Thomas that Miranda cries over the letter.

I have mildly fucked with the timelines for the Earls of Shaftesbury, mostly because the Shaftesbury Thomas would have been friends with (Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury) didn’t become earl until 1699, and this scene takes place in 1695. But my Shaftesbury’s courtesy title prior to becoming earl was Lord Ashley, and that was just too confusing with Lord Ashbourne/Peter Ashe.

I didn’t read a lot about the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, but what I did read about him (Gill 2017, Champion 2014) makes him sound super nice and extremely someone Thomas would have liked. He argued that it was natural to humans to work to advance societal happiness and prosperity, and he was of the school of thought that virtuous men were required to build good and free governments. Also, he ordered his estate’s stewards to let him know if anybody from the estate needed anything ever, and he loved mentoring promising young men. Which makes it even more likely that he and Thomas would have been pals!

Oh, also, he thought that different people needed different moral treatment, and the key was finding the balance for each individual. I think that could have been a very beneficial thing for a young queer Protestant to hear! Plus, his family seat was in Dorset, where I had already decided Thomas was from. With bonus help from Shaftesbury’s Wikipedia page and entry in the DNB.

> All through the journey to Dorset, she cannot avoid the feeling that she is riding to her doom, as if it is she and not Thomas’s mother who will be wrapped up tight in a woollen shroud and laid to rest under the cold eyes of a man who hates her.

I couldn’t find an organic way include this detail in the fic, but the Burial in Woollen Acts required that dead people in England be buried in English wool shrouds and not foreign textiles. If you wanted to dress your family members in nice clothes and silk stockings to be buried, you had to pay a fine (Olsen 1999). 

> with talk of the Mughal Emperor’s recent imprisonment of the East India Company traders

I went to the “1695 in England” Wikipedia page to hunt for a current event for Alfred Hamilton to discuss, and it was just my good fortunate that the _Gunsway_ incident happened in September of that year. THEME-Y. “Red Sea men” is what pirates of the Mediterranean were called.

The pirate [Henry Avery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Every#The_Grand_Mughal's_fleet)’s men took the _Gunsway_ (the name is an Anglicization of _Ganj-i-Sawai,_ which was the ship’s actual name), a ship of the Grand Mughal’s fleet, to a profit of a thousand pounds per sailor. The Mughal emperor was rightly furious, as the pirates had not only stolen his money but subjected his people, the passengers on board the _Gunsway,_ to horrific violence. He had the local employees of the East India Company arrested and threatened to besiege Bombay if he was not given satisfaction by the English government—it was a proper diplomatic and financial crisis! I got this mostly from Earle 2005 and Burgess 2009.

In a few months, though, Alfred’s going to feel like a real asshole for bragging on his investment choices, because what happens next is that Avery goes to Nassau and bribes the Nassau governor, Sir Nicholas Trott, to let him come into the harbor and not tattle on him. Shortly afterward, Avery disappears—FROM HISTORY.

(I love it when pirates disappear FROM HISTORY. See also: Anne Bonny.)

> an attitude she has picked up from Thomas, who is prone to hiding himself behind curtains

This is a foreshadow! 

> He says her name in the way that is particular to him: startled by its aptness, _Miranda,_ as if she is indeed a thing to be wondered at.

The name Miranda comes from the Latin _miro,_ but it’s in the gerundive form, which conveys obligation or inevitability: This person _must_ be marveled at (which is, of course, how Thomas feels about Miranda). It is called passive periphrastic. It rules. The classic example of passive periphrastic is that Cato the Elder ended every speech by saying _Carthago delenda est_ (Carthage must be destroyed). If you don’t know, now you know. 

> the bust of Sir Christopher Marlowe

Yes, I have put a gay bust in this coming-out scene. Don’t judge me. The idea that libraries of this period had pillars with busts on came from Brewer (1997). 

> Men are designed to live in harmony with themselves and their fellow man

I’ve put some of Shaftesbury’s ideas into Thomas’s mouth here. Thanks to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Gill 2017) for helping me out with summaries of basically what Shaftesbury said and what it meant.

You know that Tumblr post about how writing women characters in fic is often like being a volunteer archaeologist? That’s how I feel about writing Thomas. We see so little of him in actual canon, and a lot of what we do see is filtered through Miranda and James, who idolize him. I have tried so hard to make him interesting and kind and smart, and this is one of the first scenes where I really got into it. I hope it works as a coming-out scene and doesn’t feel anachronistic—I really was trying to find a way for Thomas to frame his queerness in a way that would tally with his religious and intellectual background, because that seems like the kind of person he was.

> Nobody has ever told her before that she need not be the thing her father wants of her, the dutiful and chaste daughter, later the obedient wife and mother; nobody before this boy who has put his life in her hands and thinks her a wonder. 

The other thing I deeply wanted out of this scene was to show another aspect of why Miranda loves Thomas so ferociously much. It’s not just a question of his goodness; it’s a function of the fact that she felt trapped in her world, and he showed her an intellectual path out (in this scene) and gave her a material path out (through marriage). Even though he’s talking about himself here, he’s showing her cracks in the foundations of patriarchy.

It’s also worth mentioning that Thomas has the time, freedom, education, etc., to pursue these lines of thought exactly because he’s wealthy, white, noble, and male. He hasn’t figured this shit out first because he’s smarter than Miranda; he’s figured it out because he’s given time and space to think about these things in a critical way. And I wanted to mention that because I really, really, _really_ didn’t want to suggest that this isn’t a marriage of equals. Knowing and admiring Miranda, and seeing how hard she chafes against expectations of women, is part of what makes it possible for Thomas to think these thoughts.

> Miranda says, “I do.”

In my fic, Thomas and Miranda’s wedding is kind of a bummer. This scene is really the moment that marks their permanent commitment to each other.

### Chapter 12

> Cook had done a nearly perfect quire of paper

Look at this ridiculous business ([link](https://www.lavenderandlovage.com/2012/02/shrove-tuesday-pancake-day-and-a-quire-of-paper-a-stack-of-pancakes-with-lemon-sugar.html)). A quire of paper is a bunch of very very very thin pancakes served with sauce (this picture has them with lemon and sugar). A gifted cook would make them paper-thin and not at all burny. 

> The rest of the treasure fleet ought to have left Havana by now

Narrator: It had not. 

> and if it reaches Madrid before news of the wreck does, it’s possible they’ll write off the loss of the Urca.

Ships from treasure fleets sometimes did get lost at sea, and that was just the cost of doing business. If a ship was known to have been lost at sea, Spain wouldn’t spend their whole lives trying to chase it down, as that would have been expensive folly.

In real life, a Spanish treasure fleet of which the _Urca de Lima_ was a part did wreck near Florida in the summer of 1715. They were very late setting out, which led to their being caught in hurricane season and (mostly) destroyed. In my fic, the _Urca_ is sent out ahead of the other ships along the secret route known to the Spaniard named Vazquez; the idea being that some treasure acquired in a timely manner was better than more treasure delivered very late (or caught in a hurricane and delivered not at all).

Burgess and Clausen (1977) said that—wait for it—ALMOST NINETY FIVE PERCENT of the precious metals that backed up European money came from Spanish treasure fleets. The fleet that sailed in 1715 was the first in a _while,_ thanks to the War of Spanish Succession making life hard on everybody, and Spain really really really needed the money.

> “In Nassau, when the wind blew like that, it meant a storm. But here… I don’t know.” 

Wind imagery for Thomas! The loss of Thomas turns out to mean something different in London than the thing they understood that loss to mean when in Nassau. I also just liked this little indication of how bewildering they’re both finding London. I rewrote this section on a day when a storm was coming, and there was this really particular storm-is-coming wind blowing that made me think about the legibility of weather in different places. 

> Thomas prayed morning and evening, and Miranda had grown up in a church, but it was James who knew the Bible best, and could quote it chapter and verse.

This is a headcanon of mine, and I was pleased that I found a way to work it into the fic! More sailors than you might expect were literate, according to Earle, and it was pretty common for sailors to own a copy of the Bible. So I have this headcanon of James as a kid on board ships just ravenous for reading material and reading various people’s Bibles over and over again. 

> Oh, God, but if she had known, then why had she not held him back from their doom, why had she let him walk unknowing down that crooked three-path’d way?

I rewrote this scene sixteen trillion times. On the sixteen trillionth go-round, I suddenly remembered that Oedipus killed his father Laius at a three-way crossroads. Awfully decent of classical antiquity to set up such a lovely, useful metaphor for my OT3.

Because the John Dryden version of Sophocles’s _Oedipus Rex_ didn’t have a good quotable line about this, I’ve pulled “the crooked three-path’d way” from Alexander Neville’s translation of Seneca’s _Oedipus._

> To ensure that the Board might most efficiently discharge its Obligations, it was agreed upon that incurable Madmen should be remanded into the custody of a more fitting Institution, directly our good Doctors felt assured that their Affliction might not be mended by the standard course of Treatment.

Jonathan Andrews (1994) argues that Bethlem Royal Hospital was intended to be a place where patients got cured; they regularly boasted that over two-thirds of their patients were cured while under treatment there. Incurable patients were ordered to be removed from Bethlem on an ad hoc basis until 1708, when a standard procedure was developed to more systematically clear incurables out of Bethlem and into more suitable venues for their longterm upkeep.

TBH this probably doesn’t mean that in 1708 they would have suddenly been like “hello, fellow whose upkeep is being handsomely funded by an earl, kindly get the fuck out of here at once,” but it made a useful reason for Ashbourne to look elsewhere for places to stash Thomas.

> Eleanor Guthrie arrived in a blue dress that had obviously not been made for her. Her hair was loose, which suggested her lady’s maid was either unable or unwilling to dress it properly.

Yes I _am_ very angry about how Eleanor was costumed in seasons three and four; yes I did badly miss her dark red leather jacket from seasons one and two. I get that it was character-appropriate, but while we’re here, I also hate her character arc in the back two seasons. You will note that I have made some, um, changes to it in this fic. 

> scotch collops

Please enjoy this video of two nerds making scotch collops ([link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rT6J0OxEmM)). They look delicious. Peter is serving these because I had a few cookbooks with suggested menus for various months, and scotch collops were on the menu for May (May 1685). And also they looked delicious and comforting, and poor Miranda needed some comfort food. 

> Miranda smiled demurely at them and ate a bite of neat’s tongue and broccoli. 

Another late-stage panic from reading Weatherill 1996: She claimed that forks were not in common use until later in the 1700s! You did not find them in probate inventories of this period very often! I did not want to go down a fork research rabbit hole trying to figure out if Miranda and Thomas would have eaten with a fork, so I have just removed all fork mentions in this fic.

(I had at least four tense dinner moments that involved forks, and I had to alter them.)

Full disclosure, I went part way down a fork research rabbit hole and discovered this Slate.com article ([link](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/design/2012/06/the_history_of_the_fork_when_we_started_using_forks_and_how_their_design_changed_over_time_.html)), which contains the following very cursed passage:

> In an essay in _Feeding Desire_ on the sexual politics of cutlery, Carolin Young notes that in 1605, an anonymous allegorical novel about the courtiers of Henry III portrayed a mysterious island peopled by hermaphrodites, whose behavior is characterized by theatricality, artifice, and falsehood. Sure enough, the hermaphrodites eat with forks, spilling more food than they manage to consume in their pursuit of the new and the unnecessary. Young traces the “unsettlingly effeminate aura” of the fork all the way through 1897, when British sailors are still eating without forks, considering them to be unmanly.

I could not obtain electronic access to this article on the sexual politics of cutlery (heartbreaking), and that is the only reason I did not dig deeper into forks and how gay England thought they were.

….Ugh, except, okay, fuller disclosure, I _did_ dig deeper into forks and how gay England thought they were, and I read the utensils chapter of Wilson 2012, and _she_ said that everyone was using forks by 1700, so now I don’t know what to believe. Do we have new evidence since Weatherill wrote her book in 1994? New evidence to prove that actually, there were lots of forks in probate records in the 1700s? Or, or, are probate records on a time lag because old people are the ones who die and old people haven’t adopted newfangled utensil trends yet? Or is Bee Wilson not a trained historian and is just mistaken? I DON’T KNOW. There are no forks in this fic, just in case.

> He would have preferred that she stop antagonizing Peter, but he also liked her fractious. Thomas, too.

How to know you’re in a Babylon story: Ambiguous parallel structure where both interpretations of the sentence (James also liked Thomas fractious; Thomas also liked Miranda fractious) are true.

I also loooooved writing this scene, because I love angry Miranda _the most._ I wrote a novel-length fic to recover from the sudden death of angry Miranda, is how much I love angry Miranda. And I also always get a kick out of writing scenes where Eleanor or James is manipulating someone—maybe especially Eleanor? I think the show sometimes underrates Eleanor’s cleverness, or at least underrates how much more successful and beloved she would be by the other characters of the show if she were a man. This bit where she acts slightly adorable to manipulate Peter into thinking she’s harmless is scenes from my real life.

> gooseberry fool

Here’s Mary Berry making a gooseberry fool! ([link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2ae4cDJf7k))

### Chapter 14

> “O brave new world,” she says.

I say again: I am a model of restraint for only quoting _The Tempest_ twice in this fic. 

> The house James takes, atop a small hill, was attached to a sugar farm that had been raided by the Spanish.

One of the impacts of the War of Spanish Succession was to consolidate sugar farms in the Caribbean. French and Spanish raids were frequent, and smaller farmers could not defend their property against the raid. Nor did they have the funds to rebuild over and over. Most often, they would fall into debt, which they would settle by selling up to larger, richer farmers (Dunn 1972). 

> She likes to turn her back on the land

Robert Frost reference! ([link](http://www.online-literature.com/frost/761/)) 

> and watch the cool, certain water as it laps against the shoreline

As mentioned, I’ve associated James with a lot of water imagery in this fic, and Miranda with a lot of (is)land imagery. So she’s talking about the ocean here, but she’s also thinking about herself and James.

### Chapter 15

> he had not been found by men in blue coats

The people who worked at Bedlam wore blue coats (Andrews 1991). I liked that specific little detail; I don’t know why.

> a letter to his banker, requesting that he permit the bearer, The Right Honble. The Viscountess Wallingford, to draw upon his account in any amount she should require

I initially planned for Benedict to send Miranda a bunch of cash, but that seemed dicey in terms of postal security. Then I thought he could send her a bunch of bank notes (this was useful!), but a, I couldn’t find out what they would have looked like in 1715 and what they would have _said_ in 1715, and b, I didn’t feel confident he’d _have_ a bunch of bank notes. Why would he? I don’t know.

So in the end I declared a very annoyed research bankruptcy and said this instead. I apologize.

> From Benedict’s bank, she withdrew the sum of forty pounds and hid it with the pearls, under a floorboard in their bedroom that James had pried loose. She would not be caught unprepared again, not ever again.

My beta asked me what forty pounds meant, so this note is for people like them. Various sources made various claims about the value of forty pounds and how much you needed to get by. This is enough money to buy you a cushion, pretty much—call it nine thousand pounds in today’s money.

> The Associates of Dr Thomas Bray

This is An Clue but like, a very oblique one. More on this in a bit.

> The Charitable Corporation for the Relief of Industrious Poor

Eighteenth-century charities had funny names. This one’s real.

> a passage from Whichcote’s Aphorisms

I read several books about the religious/intellectual history at this time (Brewer 1997, Champion 2014, Harrison 1990, and Rivers 1991), and I am not confident that anything I wrote down in my notes from those books is actually correct. This is 1/3 because it was quite confusing to read, 1/3 because I was bored and not paying the greatest attention SORRY, and 1/3 because I wasn’t willing to put in enough work to figure out which of these religious traditions Thomas would most plausibly have belonged to. So I’ve done a very magpie job of it here and just picked up everything that sparkled out of the books I did read. If anyone out there is an intellectual historian of the late 1600s early 1700s and wants to tell me what sort of a religious person Thomas would have been, uh, hit me up.

However: As mentioned elsewhere, I’ve made Thomas a friend and intellectual companion to the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (he makes a cameo during Thomas’s mother’s funeral). When I found references to Shaftesbury liking this or that religious thinker, I generally was like, ah, yes, this is probably a religious thinker that Thomas and Miranda would have liked/been familiar with.

That is a long way of saying that I just liked the cut of the latitudinarians’ jib. They seem like real sweetie-pies! (Comparatively speaking.) Whichcote was one, and while he didn’t publish much (he was more of a sermons-giving guy), Shaftesbury anonymously edited and published a collection of his Sermons in 1698. Shaftesbury called Whichcote “the Preacher of Good-Nature” which is the cutest thing I encountered in all my very boring religious/intellectual history reading for this fic (Rivers 1991).

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Babylon, literally nobody finds this interesting, including you.” RUDE BUT TRUE, but also, just in case anyone _does_ find it interesting, I wanted to give you a way to check my work.

> a representative of the Council of Trade and Plantations

The Council of Trade and Plantations was a one-stop shop for information about British colonies. It didn’t have any legislative power, but it was involved with colonial governors (so Peter Ashe would have had a lot of dealings with them, as the governor of the Carolina Colony), colonial disputes, and proposed legislation relating to colonial affairs. They got a lot of complaints about pirates. Like, a lot. They were very, very tired of hearing about pirates, and they were the ones charged by the King with finding a solution to the pirate problem on New Providence Island; which is why a member of the Council would be a really good ally for Peter and James to have. James should not be queering their pitch by storming out of the Council of Trade and Plantations meetings.

> I can’t find a way to spare you

_Angels in America_ quote! Prior says it to Louis right before Louis ditches him. Watch/read _Angels in America_ ; it rules.

> She wanted to know that he thought of Thomas still; she wanted to hear Thomas’s name in his mouth.

I’ll come back to this! Suffice it to say that I have thought _a lot_ about how the circumstances where James says Thomas’s name.

### Chapter 16

> After a long moment in which Miranda says nothing, Thomas sighs and settles himself on the carpet at the foot of her chair. His shoulder presses against the chair’s armrest, and one hand rests lightly on Miranda’s ankle.

One of my favorite things is to make characters pick up habits and mannerisms from other characters. This is Thomas’s way of being present for Miranda without being physically threatening. Later in this chapter, we’ll see Miranda do this same move when she’s trying to comfort Lady Macclesfield; and in the last chapter, we’ll see James replicating a version of it when Thomas gets upset after they kiss for the first time.

> “Why should I,” she says, “resign myself to being fucked once a week for the next forty years by some—some shopkeeper, and probably die birthing fourteen fat dull babies for him, or else be consigned to prostitution and moral decay and whatever else my father thinks happens to women who let a man between their legs?”
> 
> Thomas tilts his head back and gives her his sweetest smile. “There is a third option.”
> 
> “That’s just the first one without the bloody screaming death,” says Miranda waspishly.

This is one of the first scenes I wrote for this fic, and I’m still very fond of it. Miranda doesn’t want to be saved, and Thomas never, ever wants to push at her boundaries—but he’s also aware, and here very _viscerally_ aware, of the risks the world poses to her. There’s a central paradox to their relationship, which is that he doesn’t want ownership over her, but he wants her to be safe, and the way to keep her safe is marriage, i.e., ownership. And I like this scene because he makes it so clear that he respects her boundaries, even when they disagree, even when he’s scared for her. What a good egg.

> her pattens

Pattens are, like, shoes for your shoes. I learned about them in the American Girl catalog as a child while yearning for a Felicity doll.

> _By this light, I take thee for pity,_ she thinks, and laughs at herself.

Benedick says this to Beatrice at the end of _Much Ado,_ and it is funny and charming because _Much Ado_ is an absolutely terrific play.

> _Make him stop,_ she thinks at Thomas. _This is your own house. Make him damned well stop._

I got such a kick out of writing this whole sequence of Miranda trying to come to terms with herself as Thomas’s wife, and the fact that she’s angry with him for saving her. If that is a dynamic you enjoy, I recommend to your kind attention the book _Strong Poison_ and its banger of a sequel, _Have His Carcase,_ and its even more banger of a threequel, _Gaudy Night._

> Thomas looks up from his book. “Mary would be happy to bring dinner to your rooms.”
> 
> “I did not ask if Mary would be happy to bring dinner to my rooms.”
> 
> “So you didn’t.”
> 
> “I asked why you let him speak to you like that.”

This exchange isn’t really anything, but I like it a lot. It’s setting up the central problem Thomas will need to untangle about himself in his section of the fic, which is that when he feels threatened, he simply pulls away—an adaptive strategy for him as a child with his shitty father that does not serve him well in real life.

> Father said she must be talking with other men, or else why would she be barren?

A trope in this period was that women who were having sex outside of their marriages would be barren (Turner 2002). The patriarchy is so fucking weird! What the fuck! 


End file.
